There is a great post over at Scottburns.com about Home Depot. I remember reading Scott’s column regarding his experience at Home Depot and I just shook my head. I have had my share of frustrating experiences there. Most of the time it’s related to the length of time it takes to get through the checkout lines. I’ve literally sat there for 25-30 minutes to get to a cashier. The employees don’t seem to care that I’ve just given up 30 minutes of my life waiting to give them my money either.
So, it was very interesting to me to see that the CEO of Home Depot (Frank Blake) sent Scott a note (which he posted on his site) talking about all that Home Depot is doing to win back their customers. For now, I’m going to Lowe’s. Since I’m in the middle of building our lake house, I’m spending a lot of time in the home improvement stores and HD certainly has lost their share of my business. Before my bad experiences, I just went to Home Depot, loaded up what I needed, and moved on. I never really paid attention to price (which is rare for me) because I knew I needed it and had an expectation that they were giving me the best price due to their volume. Apparently I’ve spent too much time in Costco and have started to have the false assumption that other stores are treating me as well as Costco does. Now that I’ve been going to Lowe’s, I’ve been surprised that more than a few of their items are cheaper than HD.
Anyway, go check out the article on Scott Burns Assetbuilder site. It’s worth the read, just like many of his other articles are.
I agree.
First their prices are not competitive.
They have trimmed their work force so it takes forever to find someone when you have a question. I have searched around for 20 minutes sometimes.
They are the exact same as Lowes except Lowes is more expensive than them.
One good thing I can say is that at my Home Dept in Anchorage they have installed U Scans which I love and makes things 10x faster.